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DESCRIPTION:Laura Wexler will be coming to speak at the Mr. and Mrs. Raymon
 d J. Horowitz Foundation Seminar in New York and American Material Culture
  on Wednesday\, November 28\, 2012.  Her talk is entitled “In Order to For
 m a More Perfect Likeness: Frederick Douglass\, Photography and the Image 
 of the Nation.”The famed African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass 
 (1818-1895) was one of the most photographed men of the nineteenth-century
 .  But his engagement with photography extended well beyond his numerous\,
  widely circulated portraits.  During the slave era\, Douglass heard in th
 e click of the shutter a promise of the shackle’s release: if black people
  could appropriate by means of the camera the power of objectification tha
 t slavery wielded\, photography would become an agent of radical social tr
 ansformation.  After Emancipation\, Douglass thought that photography coul
 d become a tool for remaking the national imagination through positive ima
 ges of African Americans\, and therefore act as a visionary means for chan
 ge.  Douglass’s little-known contributions to a theory of photography as p
 olitical action is the subject of Professor Wexler’s talk.Laura Wexler is 
 Professor of American Studies\, Professor of Women’s\, Gender and Sexualit
 y Studies\, and Director of The Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale Unive
 rsity.  She also directs the Photogrammar Project\, an interactive web-bas
 ed open source visualization platform for the 160\,000 photographs created
  by the federal government from 1935 to 1943 under the Farm Securities Adm
 inistration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).  Wexler completed her
  undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College\, having also attended th
 e Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studied photography.  Sh
 e holds M.A.\, M. Phil.\, and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in En
 glish and Comparative Literature.  Wexler is the author of numerous articl
 es and scholarly volumes about American photography and visual culture.  T
 hese include Pregnant Pictures (Routledge\, 2000)\, co-written with Sandra
  Matthews\, and Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperi
 alism (University of North Carolina Press\, 2000)\, which won the Joan Kel
 ley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association.  She also co-ed
 ited Interpretation and the Holocaust\, a special issue of The Yale Journa
 l of Criticism (Spring 2001) with Laura Frost\, Amy Hungerford\, and John 
 Mackay.  Her current research interests center upon photographic represent
 ations of the politics of white supremacy and resistance to it in the Unit
 ed States.  Wexler is now at work on a monograph about race and American v
 isual culture\, The Awakening of Cultural Memory Mapping Kate Chopin\, and
  a collection of essays\, The Look\, The Gaze and the Relay Race: Photogra
 phy and Everyday Memory.  Here she explores of the work of Diane Arbus\, R
 oman Vishniac\, and Randolf Linsly Simpson\, among others.
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20121128T180000
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SUMMARY:Bard Graduate Center: In Order to Form a More Perfect Likeness: Fre
 derick Douglass\, Photography and the Image of the Nation
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